Listening to the Zoo

The context of the research

Every year 700 million people visit zoological gardens worldwide, with more than 30 million of these visits taking place in the UK. Apart from the significant economic role they play as tourist attractions, many zoos also aim to educate their visitors about biodiversity, exposing them to species they would not otherwise have the opportunity to encounter directly and providing information about these species. As part of their educational role, many zoos offer the public opportunities to learn about and engage with conservation and environmental protection projects. Zoos are usually approached as places where animals are, first and foremost, seen. This project, however, aims to transform the way we think about zoos by attending closely to an aspect of these institutions that has previously been neglected or overlooked: their sounds or 'soundscapes'.

Its aims and objectives

Through close collaboration with two project partner zoos in the UK, this project seeks to trial innovative sound research methodologies to generate detailed knowledge about how sounds are woven into the experience of zoos for visitors, staff, people who live near zoos and for zoo animals themselves. It sets out to explore how listening, and attending to different kinds and qualities of sound can promote new forms of awareness of human and animal behaviour in the zoo context. The project sets out to change the mode in which zoo visitors engage with species on display, prompting the development of an 'acoustic mindfulness' that complicates, challenges and augments a visually-orientated approach to animals in the zoo. It also aims to explore whether silent listening (where groups of volunteers visit the zoo and listen whilst being silent) can have transformative effects, prompting people to be more sensitive to how, for instance, anthropogenic noise impacts upon both human and animal behaviours. The research is interdisciplinary, combining approaches from the social and natural sciences with the goal of producing a multi-species sonic ethnography of the zoo, something that has never been done before but which promises to allow social science to inform environmental awareness and citizenship in new ways. The study will enrich our grasp of the social processes underpinning relationships between humans and animals by providing a sonic perspective.

Its potential applications and benefits

This project has clear potential benefits for a wide range of academics from a variety of disciplines who have an interest in human-animal relations, especially as these are expressed in the zoo setting. It will complement, but also challenge and develop existing methodological and theoretical approaches to the zoo in the social sciences which foreground vision and acts of looking. In addition to producing outputs for academic audiences, the project will facilitate the production of innovative sonic resources that can be used by the partner zoos to enhance the conservation education and environmental awareness activities they conduct with schoolchildren and other zoo visitors. The project will also generate findings that can be applied by zoo keepers and researchers in order to provide optimum sound environments for the animals in their care. Dissemination of the research findings and sound resources through zoo associations will create opportunities for the project to benefit a large number of other zoos, their users and animals, both nationally and internationally. The findings and impact resources that will be produced through the project also have considerable potential applications and benefits for other settings in which animals are kept in captive conditions, such as farms, laboratories and some human homes.

Who will benefit from this research? How will they benefit?

This collaborative project will have benefits for a number of target groups. These include:

- The project partner zoos, Bristol and Paignton. The research will help them to enhance visitor engagement and meet conservation education aims. The project will specifically benefit the following groups at these zoos:

a) Zoo education staff. They will benefit by being provided with a framework within which they can collaborate in the development of sonic resources that will enhance their environment and biodiversity education activities.

b) Zoo keepers and research staff. The interdisciplinary knowledge co-produced through the project will enable them to become more knowledgeable and mindful of how sound environments may impact on the species in their care.

c) Schoolchildren. A classroom sonic resource developed through the project will allow children who participate in the education sessions run by the participant zoos to develop their knowledge and understanding of biodiversity and environmental issues.

d) The general public. They will be given access to a visitor sonic resource that will provide enhanced zoo visits and new experiences of the participant zoos, the animals that live in them and the conservation initiatives directed at ensuring the survival of vulnerable species.

e) Zoo members. Volunteers from among zoo memberships will have opportunities to participate in experimental zoo visits, including sound walk visits and silent zoo visits, which will enable the participants to experience how an acoustic perspective, or silence as a mode of engagement, can change their relationship to the zoo and its animals.

f) Members of the local community surrounding each zoo. They will benefit by having their sonic experiences of the zoos represented as an important aspect of local identity, heritage and community.

g) Local authorities. Local authority noise teams will have an opportunity to become more closely involved with the zoos as stakeholders in the management of local soundscapes.

h) Zoo animals. They are likely to experience improved care and conditions as a result of the project through increased awareness on the part of their carers as to the importance of sound as an aspect of animal welfare.

- Professional zoo association members, including members of of BIAZA (the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums), EAZA (the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums) and AZA (the Association of Zoos and Aquariums based in the USA). They will benefit from the circulation of project findings and impact activities which will give them access to sonic resources for improved conservation education, guidance on managing zoo sound environments in the interests of animal welfare and frameworks for the introduction of experimental sound walk visits and silent zoo visits. Embedding the project findings, sonic resources and listening activities within association member zoos will create opportunities for representatives of all the identified target groups (zoo educators, zoo keepers and research staff, schoolchildren, the zoo visiting general public, local community members and zoo animals) to benefit from the research in the ways specified above, both nationally and internationally.